Does Avanquest Web Easy Professional 8 try to make building a website too simple?

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With a name like Web Easy Professional, it's no surprise to find that the focus of this software is on simplicity.

A balance between simplicity and versatility is essential for website creation software, and we found that Web Easy Professional 8 didn't quite get that crucial balance right.

Almost all of the templates included with Web Easy Professional 8 look tacky and outdated. When selecting a template, we were shown a small thumbnail of what the website would look like, which was too small to accurately see what the result would be.

For a better look, we had to skip through a number of steps in the website creation walkthrough. If we weren't happy with the template (and we frequently weren't thanks to some poor designs), we had to start the walkthrough all over again. This is a good example of how Web Easy Professional 8's vaunted simplicity ends up causing more work for the user.

One of the steps asks you to replace the stock images with photos from your PC. This strangely convoluted process involves browsing your computer for photos and adding them to a list, then selecting an image from the list and pressing an arrow icon for the photo to be inserted. You can only see which photo will be replaced by peering at the small thumbnail, making it difficult to see how your changes are affecting the website.

You can also enter text in fields during the walkthrough to populate the website, but once again we felt that instead of making things simpler, it in fact made things more complicated, because you can't be sure where the fields will appear in the final website.

The process of adding e-commerce components is also tricky, and we had to go through a number of steps and menus before we could add PayPal.

With Web Easy Professional 8 it's possible to make a working website and publish it to the internet in about an hour, but we found that we wasted time struggling against some counter-intuitive design decisions and the results were far from great.